ABSTRACT
International media reports have characterized the Indonesian government’s pandemic response as slow, confused and inept while emphasizing the country’s limited state capacity to manage the Covid-19 outbreak. Emerging academic work explains these as results of a decade of ‘democratic decline’ where rising anti-scientific religious populism has conspired to undermine a coherent state response. Such accounts focus solely on the responses of the central government, without reckoning with developments during two decades of neoliberal state transformation that have shifted both budgets and organizational capacities for infectious disease response to the district (kabupaten), sub-district (kecamatan) and municipal (kotamadya) levels. Noticeably, the most coherent response strategies have come from district and municipal governments who have enforced their own lockdowns, driven coordinated contract-tracing regimes, and set up their own social support services. These local government responses have been buttressed by the emergence of many local community mobilizations around the age-old neighborhood administration system, previously used by the authoritarian New Order regime to extend political control over the citizenry. While we acknowledge the risk factors for Indonesia due to significant structural weaknesses, the current crisis highlights the long-standing political tensions of decentralization and neoliberal social policy.
